This is appalling:
A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.
The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.
Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.
“Tavarez was … was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.
“I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy,” Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
He made clear he wasn’t about to pass off the two legit arrests he had made in the bar to Tavarez.
“As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division,” he said.
A few bad apples.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
“A few” meaning many, and in a horrifying way.
West of the Cascades
Patrick Lynch responded that Bill De Blasio “has coke on his hands” because he criticized the police for making illegal drug arrests.
Comrade Dread
Yes, let’s ruin an innocent citizen’s life so your buddy doesn’t have to go back to patrol work.
But, you know, it would be completely inappropriate and akin to us telling people to go kill cops if we say that we shouldn’t trust the police to protect or serve us.
Fucking sociopaths.
cahuenga
I find it interesting to note that the few people I grew up with that went on to become police officers were also the most rampant delinquents. File under “anecdotal”.
Joel
The quota incentive structure is so completely fucked up. Policing quality should not be measured by how many arrests you make. It’s so completely backwards it boggles my mind.
Face
So we should be expecting NYPD to now be turning their backs on this judge, the prosecutor, and the jury, right? After all, they’re not demonstrating ultimate fealty to One Time, as they should. In fact, I expect Five-O to be boycotting this courtroom and stopping and frisking all baliffs (bali?) on their way out to their cars.
How dare they charge cops doing illegal things as criminals?
Kropadope
I think I highlighted the problem for you there…
Gin & Tonic
This April will be 45 years since the NYT front-paged the Serpico story, which led to the forming of the Knapp Commission. Looks like nothing has changed.
Punchy
So it behooves a city to have a rampant drug problem just to give vice cops their quota, lest they begin to plant false charges on the innocents? Am I reading that correctly?
People stand a better chance of NOT being arrested/charged (falsely) by living in a drug-infested city than living in a drug-free one?
Holy fuckin jeebus.
John Revolta
“That’s for something you did that we didn’t find out about.”
Couldn't Stand the Weather
I knew that quotas were a problem, for offenses like moving violations and parking tickets.
But, narcotics busts? This is past ridiculous, heading for Fucking Insane.
It’s something out of an Orwell novel. Or maybe Philip K. Dick.
LWA (Liberal With Attitude)
Here in LA, back in the 90’s, there was the LAPD Rampart scandal, where the LAPD admitted to shooting a guy, framing him for crimes he didn’t commit, and he rotted in prison for a few years before it came to light.
Choice tidbits:
One Hundred Twenty Five Million dollars, paid by the taxpayers of Los Angeles for crooked cops.
Oh, and this:
The items on the Wikipedia page detail theft of pounds of cocaine, beating of suspects, ties to street gangs, possible murder of Notorious BIG, among other highlights.
People often wonder how a white, middle class, middle aged suburban guy like me has developed such a suspicion and fear of the police.
I wonder how anyone can possible not have such an attitude.
C.V. Danes
@Face: This. Exactly.
Jado
“A few bad apples…”
At this stage, it’s looking more and more like a few GOOD apples, trying to stay clean in barrel full of rotten apple slop
C.V. Danes
@Gin & Tonic: Nope. Nothing. Nada.
raven
Your eers are on.
The Ancient Randonneur
Has PBA President Patrick Lynch blamed this on the mayor yet?
C.V. Danes
@LWA (Liberal With Attitude):
Oh, the 1-percenters love them some police because, you know, that’s who the police actually work for. And they know it. The white 1-percenters, anyway.
srv
Liberal cities are corrupt, news at 11.
I’m sure it’s Rudy’s fault.
C.V. Danes
@Jado:
Looks like NYC needs to fire their 30,000 cops and bring in
BlackwaterXe ServicesAcademi to runs things for them.zmulls
Still waiting for the first “juking the stats” reference….
Hungry Joe
Everyone in jail or prison for any non-violent drug crime should be released. Everyone with such an offense on his or her record should have it scrubbed clean.
The downside would be … now, let’s see … the downside would be … hmmmm …
LWA (Liberal With Attitude)
@C.V. Danes:
Its been my experience that my fellow white suburbanites love the police, since they imagine that this brutality and corruption will only ever be directed at THOSE people.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
What rampant drug problem? Drug use (except for pot) has been going down for at least a decade:
The problem would seem to be that the quotas are set at unrealistic “drug war” levels of use that just don’t exist anymore, so the only way to keep up the arrest rate is to frame innocent people. There just aren’t as many illegal drug users as there used to be, so there aren’t as many people available to arrest.
hilts
We need more police like Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson
Police Chief Tells Pro-Cop Critic To Respect Protesters In Powerful Letter
h/t http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/read-nashville-police-chief-tells-pro-cop-critic-respect-protesters
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Gin & Tonic:
I am shocked.
John Revolta
@Mnemosyne: Sure, you can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.
Punchy
@Mnemosyne: Doesn’t the math look like this?
High # of arrests = More cops + More fed/state money = higher salaries + more jobs = bigger ego
Therefore
Fewer arrests = less justification for cops = fewer cops = old white Fox-addicited people freak the fuck out = mayor not re-elected
Thus, sky-high quotas.
Roger Moore
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather:
Kafka. Definitely Kafka.
ruemara
Toss in today’s new graduates from the NYPD academy who BOOED Mayor di Blasio as he spoke at their convocation, and I see a bold new future of shame and corruption headed out on the streets.
Couldn't Stand the Weather
@Punchy:
Sad, but all too likely.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
Ah, okay. I suspected some snark in your initial comment, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure. :-) That is definitely part of the calculation — if you can’t prove your usefulness in an easy way, then cutbacks start, so it’s better to frame innocent people than to have the quotas lowered to a realistic level (or even — gasp! — eliminated).
Tommy
Look if you are going to harm somebody. Break into my house. Yeah I want the police all over that. But it seems to me if it is a minor drug offense, you got a joint. Maybe you have had to many beers and are not in a car. I’d like the police to say “hey what you are doing isn’t a good idea. Let’s not do that again.” That would seem to me to be better policing then ticketing everybody they can.
SatanicPanic
@Mnemosyne: I wonder if some cops wouldn’t prefer that though. I mean, maybe they’d rather be doing something useful with their time? Who knows
Couldn't Stand the Weather
@Roger Moore:
That is true.
This quota story would have utterly shocked me, twenty years ago. In the here and now, it doesn’t. That reaction is a bit dire, all by itself.
SatanicPanic
Also, sending innocent people to jail where they can learn to commit real crimes is great if police wants to justify its current number of officers. Probably not great for anyone else though.
rikyrah
A FEW bad apples?
uh huh
uh huh
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I assume that a big part of the problem is with crimes where investigations are initiated by the police. You’re a lot less likely to have an unrealistic arrest quota for crimes like murder and robbery, where police are responding to a specific complaint, than for ones like drugs, prostitution, or traffic offenses, where the crime level is uncertain and it’s up to the police to ferret it out. That’s not to say that there’s no problem with people being framed for murder, but the police motives are different.
shelley
Serpico was on NPR a little while ago, commenting on the ‘choke hold’ death. Said back in the day, the cops would just plant a gun on a dead suspect if they thought there might be a problem/investigation. Easy-peasy.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
One would think that just looking at the number of NYPD who turned their backs on the mayor that the word few has lost all meaning. Maybe it should be redefined as more than a couple, less than 30,000.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
The problem is that the few bad apples have succeeded in spoiling the whole barrel.
Tommy
@Ruckus: My father working for the DoD used to often say to me “I work at the pleasure of the president.” I came to learn that it was his phrase he used because at times he worked for people that he didn’t vote for. But he had a job to do and he did it. When I see the police in NYC turning their back on their Mayor, I am stunned. You can’t always work for the person you voted for. You are in public service. Buck up.
Couldn't Stand the Weather
The NYPD is the largest (non-federal) police force in the damn country. And it’s apparently this fucked up.
Somebody mention a meteor?
Gin & Tonic
@Tommy: You can’t always work for the person you voted for
Trouble is, many of the NYPD cops couldn’t have voted for or against deBlasio anyway, as they are not required to reside in the city, and a lot of the racist assholes in fact do not.
patrick II
@shelley:
Planting a gun is sometimes more difficult to do with the advent of more security and cell phone video. Incidents similar to what has seemed to happen only recently: the man shot to death on the subway platform in Oakland, the man shot in Walmart for carrying a BB gun, the boy shot in Cleveland and the man choked to death in NY, have been happening for years. We are just seeing it on video now.
the Conster
There is more than one way to take someone’s life – like giving them a felony record that will proscribe all of their activities for the rest of their life. Someone here linked to an article about the Houston PD doing the same thing – having a pool of poor women and men who they could make sign anything and submit to anything to bolster their arrest quotas. It’s beyond infuriating, and maybe fearing for their own lives will make a difference. I hate that I feel that way, but there it is, because only cops can police themselves.
burnspbesq
@Gin & Tonic:
Would be interesting to map the residences of NYPD officers against the outline of the Congressional district represented by Peter King.
Mike in NC
@ruemara:
Sounds like they did an exemplary job of training those rookies.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I’m sorry but it was always more than a few. Maybe there are more bad apples today, but convincing me that there were only a few at any time in the past is not possible. I worked in south central in the 60s to late 80s. I may be white but my eyes and brain worked then just fine. I even applied to work at the LASD in the 60s, one of the nicest things the world has ever done for me was for them to not hire me.
I’ll say it again, not all police are assholes, not all of them are bad, not even every department is, but to think that only a few were is about the height of self deception.
Gin & Tonic
@burnspbesq: Or Michael Grimm.
RandomMonster
Meanwhile in Chattanooga, a white woman in body armor drives down the road shooting at cars and people, is finally cornered by the police, points her firearm at cops, and they arrest her without using lethal force. Now imagine for a moment if that was a black man, what do you suppose would be the outcome?
trollhattan
@Mike in NC:
Must “fit in” you know, older cops are watching.
C.V. Danes
@LWA (Liberal With Attitude): Yup. Torture, too.
LT
This story is dated 2011.
Chris
@Ruckus:
… but there appears to be a tendency in too many places for the bad ones’ actions to be swept under the carpet while the allegedly good ones go along with it in the name of solidarity, unit cohesion, or whatever you want to call it.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Ruckus: Agreed. Was a musician, worked in the bars and clubs in the 1980s. The level of corruption was off the charts. Went off to college. Same deal in that town, their specialty was busting tourists for drugs and then selling the same drugs back to the students in the fall.
This has been going on forever, but people rarely bothered to look around and figure out what was going on. It was never a war against drugs. Just a war against the lower income. Still is, but they’ve got to find more victims to keep the machine going so now they’re nailing the middle class as well.
AndoChronic
Police and their problems… How does blame, denial, and projection work again?
Paul W.
Wait, John did you not see Training Day? This has already been par for the NYPD course. Me having lives there for the past 10 years and all that thought it was common knowledge.
cmorenc
I assume Fox News will be as vigorously all over this story as they were the two NYPD officers who got shot by a violent criminal incited to do so (according to Fox’s portrayal) by Mayor DeBlasio, Al Sharpton, and Pres. Obama. Right?
EthylEster
@Gin & Tonic wrote: Looks like nothing has changed.
That’s what I thought as I read the post.
Haven’t we seen this movie before?
ed_finnerty
The chapters in Matt Taibbi’s the Divide about the intertwined employment support and tax reduction schemes (ala ferguson police handing out tickets) that the policing, judicial, encarcaration and parole systems have become was one of the most disturbing and disgusting things that have ever read.
Baud
I don’t know if it’s been said, but kudos to the prosecutors for doing their job.
greenergood
Lived in Lower East Side (Avenue C) in the early 1980s – happened ALL THE TIME. So discouraging to read that it’s still the main modus operandi – you’d think we could’ve invented something else by now …
Villago Delenda Est
Patrick Lynch needs to sleep with the fishes.
Ruckus
@Chris:
I’m not saying that the good ones make up in any way for the bad ones. Only that they exist. And they always did. What I’m saying is that the percentage of bad cops, whatever your measure is, is and always has been higher than many imagine. By a wide margin. And that thick blue line is one that is very hard to cross and very seldom is.
tones
@Punchy:
Exactly – I saw 8 cars for one stop this weekend -talk about tax dollars not at work…
They simply cannot justify their budgets any other way than dishonesty -crime has been going down and their budgets magically keep going up.
Another Holocene Human
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather: NYPD is set up to fail, if you just look at its internal structure. It’s both paramilitary and makes no fucking sense.
They should restructure based on the British model. That means less layers of useless brass and more authority for detectives.
Also, Compstat may be a useful tool but it’s being misused. Some of us have been screaming about this for years. Narc quotas is misuse number eleventy-seven or so.
I have a different quota for NYPD: how about reducing civil rights violations per quarter to zero.
A nice achievable goal.
Another Holocene Human
@Gin & Tonic:
There should be residency, distributed residency incentives (ie a certain # of officers get to take cars home if they live in certain neighborhoods), and long-term residency hiring preferences.
While we’re at it: civil service exams = joke. They shouldn’t be more than 25% of the score in hiring.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: LA, CHI, and NYC all have a history of infamously crooked depts. LAPD was set up crooked as far as I can tell, CHI police were the anti-labor goon squad early on and that never ended, although I guess once they got a taste of blood punching hippies during the Days of Rage police riot why wouldn’t they continue to get their sadistic jollies, this time with hapless Black South Side men? Wow. NYC were Irish Catholics who lacked for legitimate work and were deliberately underpaid and forbidden to unionize, so from day one they supplemented their incomes with protection money.
I don’t know the history of Philly police but I suspect it’s similar to NYC because their were the evidence planting champs of the 1980s in the Northeast.
Maybe a few smaller towns and suburbs had a Mayberry PD (although rural police were pretty famous for corruption and villainy prior to WWII, at least if you were a poor person), but big city policing in the US has been corrupt as fuck from the outset.
Plus it’s institutionally hard to clean up and you can never ever stop. Even the Met police I admire so much had a huge corruption scandal in the 1970s, too much temptation and not enough oversight. Cops on the take on a massive scale.
Another Holocene Human
@RandomMonster: Or a Black woman, streets of DC. Not a hypothetical. And she didn’t even point any guns.
Another Holocene Human
@ed_finnerty: Actually, Clinton was right, smaller communities in the US need federal support for patrol cops because they can’t afford it on their property taxes.
That was a great idea but somehow it turned into the Feds paying for narcotics officers and regifting military equipment, which nobody needs, while the patrol officers shake people down for traffic violations or whatever the fuck and hassle homeless people to keep the downtown business “community” off their backs, while property crime, which degrades quality of life and the local economy, languishes because they don’t have the resources. If you’re really unlucky, violent crime investigations get botched as well.
Another Holocene Human
@tones:
Plenty of communities are hurting for basic policing. You could take those moneys and redistribute them to make for better resourced and more professional forces in smaller cities (where crime rates are MUCH higher than NYC). You could do this through a federal income tax.
:)
Yeah. I like to dream.
Meyerman
If you haven’t listened to this, you should: http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent
Happened in Brooklyn. Shitty cops.